I have to admit, I did not have much understanding of XML up until a few hours ago. But I had read about the ability to use the importXML function in Google Docs spreadsheets and it looked promising so I decided to give it a try. I did use a few resources which I’ll be sure to link to at the end of this post. So what is ImportXML? It’s a function made available in Google Docs that makes it easy to make different types of web queries

How Does It Work?

The one downside is that using it requires some understanding of the html. But it can be extremely powerful. You can see 2 examples here:

#1-Imagine that I’m trying to get access to the list of all links in this page on a blog that I visit:

It’s certainly possible for me to get them all one by one or to download them in one way. Another option though is to do a simple ImportXML after seeing that these links were located inside of this code: